Australia’s children’s television sector is at risk of collapse, leaving a widening gap in local content for children and tweens at a cultural moment when governments urgently seek to strengthen youth social cohesion, including through reducing young people’s exposure to social media harms.
New RMIT University research warns current screen policy settings are failing to support the local stories young audiences need.
Submitted to the federal government’s National Cultural Policy consultation, the report comes as policymakers consider how younger people discover and engage with culture.
The report details the sector’s contraction amidst volatile conditions, with subscription video on demand (SVOD) services reporting no new children’s commissions in 2024-25, while the 2020 removal of commercial broadcaster quotas for children’s television triggered a 97% collapse in investment.
Lead author RMIT Associate Professor Jessica Balanzategui said the findings showed Australia’s children’s television sector was under severe structural pressure.
“Commercial broadcasters have retreated, streamers are not commissioning new children’s programs, and public institutions are being left to carry an increasingly heavy load,” she said.
“Over many years research has demonstrated how local children’s television scaffolds children’s participation in multicultural child citizenship and social cohesion.
“But if we want young people to stay connected to local stories, children and tweens need sustained investment in the sector and local content they can actually find.
“Our research showed that without concrete protections, children’s television faces a precarious future. Without dedicated obligations and stronger rules to make local content easy to find, we risk leaving young people with fewer local stories when they need them most.”
Associate Professor Jessica Balanzategui is the report’s lead author. Image: RMIT As commercial broadcasters and SVODs pull back from children’s television, the ABC, SBS/NITV and the Australian Children’s Television Foundation are being left to do much of the heavy lifting for the sector.
That cultural infrastructure is under growing strain, with the average cost of producing live-action children’s drama tripling over five years to $2.82 million an hour, while the volume of new first-release programming has fallen.
Despite increased commissioning investment, the ABC’s first-release children’s hours have fallen by 59% since 2019, underscoring the widening gap between what the sector is tasked with delivering and what current funding settings can sustain.
Balanzategui said children aged 10 to 14 are increasingly underserved by local screen content, with fewer new local programs being made for an audience already drifting towards global streaming services and video-sharing platforms.
“Children aged 10 to 14 are a particularly difficult audience to retain, with changing viewing habits, rising production costs and weak commissioning pathways all contributing to a shortage of new Australian content for this age group,” she said.
The report says the next phase of screen reform must deliver clear obligations, sustained investment and stronger discoverability for Australian content made for children and tweens.
Australian children’s television at the crossroads, with co-authors Jessica Balanzategui, Madeleine Hunter, Djoymi Baker and Ingrid Richardson is published by RMIT’s Streaming Industries and Genres Network (DOI: 10.25439/rmt.32541063).
